President-elect Donald Trump spent months leading up to the 2024 election distancing himself from Project 2025, the extreme and wildly unpopular policy blueprint that GOP operatives compiled to guide a second Trump term.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, back in July.
That was always nonsense, given that dozens of people who served in his first administration played a role in authoring the document.
Published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 envisions an authoritarian dismantling of the federal government, ridding federal agencies of thousands of career public servants and replacing them with an army of Trump loyalists who won’t blink at advancing extreme policies on everything from immigration and abortion to energy and education.
Now that Trump has punched his ticket back to the White House, some of his fiercest MAGA allies are openly celebrating Project 2025 — even boasting that it was the Trump plan all along.
“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” Matt Walsh, a right-wing podcast host, wrote on X hours after Trump secured his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
On his “War Room” podcast on Wednesday, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser who was recently released from prison, applauded Walsh’s post as “fabulous” and directed his staff to amplify it on social media. Bannon later held up a copy of Project 2025, titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,” and Grace Chong, the CFO of his podcast, went on to write on X, “WarRoom never said it wasn’t coming.”
Other Trump supporters, including one former administration official, also now feel comfortable touting the right-wing roadmap.
Jeremy Carl, a far-right conspiracy theorist with a record of espousing racist and anti-LGBTQ+ views, retweeted Walsh’s post. Carl served as a high-ranking Interior Department official during Trump’s first term.
Conservative influencer Benny Johnson weighed in on X, writing, “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Meanwhile, two other prominent MAGA influencers, Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, celebrated Trump’s victory on “The Charlie Kirk Show” — one of the most-listened-to podcasts in America — by doing a two-and-a-half-hour episode titled “Thoughtcrime: Project 2025 Edition,” during which they spelled out their hopes for the early days of the second Trump administration.
“Look, you got to do the mass deportations, you absolutely gotta do the mass deportations,” Posobiec said, embracing one of the central tenets of Project 2025. “There is a mandate to do this now. Because this was very clearly the top campaign promise made by President Trump in addition to tariffs on China — so mass deportation, tariffs on China, in the first 24 hours we need to see these things. And on a more wonky policy level, Schedule F. So Schedule F gives you the ability not only to fire the people that are political appointees but anyone else in the federal government.”
Schedule F, which Project 2025 advocates, refers to a policy that would allow Trump to purge the federal bureaucracy, which is historically nonpartisan, of civil servants who aren’t MAGA loyalists. (“In the hands of a president who is not committed to democratic norms, taking control of the bureaucracy is a tried and tested way to work toward authoritarian government,” Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University, told HuffPost earlier this year.)
To be clear, none of these people are currently part of Trump’s inner circle, at least not in an official capacity. And many of them take pleasure in online trolling; it’s possible that the Project 2025 celebration is just that.
But all of them have been loyal soldiers in the right-wing apparatus that worked to secure Trump’s comeback, and some are likely to wind up with roles in the administration when it takes over Jan. 20. And there are signs that several people who either contributed to or have publicly supported Project 2025 are on Trump’s shortlist for high-ranking administrative posts.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who spent election night at Trump’s watch party, has reportedly been floated as a possible pick for attorney general. The final page of the approximately 900-page Project 2025 manifesto features Lee and two other high-profile conservatives praising the document.
“The next conservative president must dismantle the administrative state and return power back to the states and the American people,” Lee wrote in his review. “This publication is a blueprint to do just that.”
In a post to X hours after Trump’s victory, Lee asked, “Which federal agency do you want to see dismantled first?”
Tom Homan, who served as Trump’s acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and is listed as a contributor to Project 2025, is also likely to land in a top administrative position. Asked during an interview last month with California’s KFI radio station about his plans related to immigration, Trump said, “You’ve seen Tom Homan. He’s coming on board.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Friday.
Despite Trump claiming ignorance about Project 2025, his support for it — or at least policies within — has long been an open secret. Many of the proposals in Project 2025 closely mirror those detailed in the official Republican Party platform, adopted in July and endorsed by Trump. And Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025 who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, told an undercover journalist earlier this year that he’s maintained close contact with Trump, has drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump’s consideration and that Trump is “very supportive of what we do.”
At a rally in Arizona five days before the election, right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson warned that Trump would return to the White House with “an army of people who know exactly what’s up.”
“They know where the bodies are likely to be buried, and they’re coming with shovels to dig them up,” Carlson said.
Among those who shared a clip of Carlson’s comments was William Perry Pendley, an anti-public lands extremist who served as Trump’s public lands chief and authored the Interior Department chapter of Project 2025.
“To paraphrase Obama, we are shovel ready,” Pendley wrote to X.
The Heritage Foundation has also made clear it is ready to assist the incoming Trump administration. In a statement Tuesday, Kevin Roberts, the group’s president and the leader of Project 2025, called Trump’s win “a victory for every American.”
“The entire conservative movement stands united behind him as he prepares to secure our wide-open border, restore the rule of law, put parents back in charge of their children’s education, restore America to its proper place as a leader in manufacturing, put families and children first, and dismantle the deep state,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group founded by a eugenicist who is also part of the Project 2025 Advisory Board, marked Trump’s victory this week by publishing an article encouraging the president-elect to make good on his promise to mass deport million of immigrants — a policy also advocated in Project 2025.
Writing in the National Review, under the headline “Message to Illegals: Winter Is Coming, So Get Ahead of It,” CIS President Mark Krikorian encouraged immigrants in the U.S. to “self-deport” — that is, to leave the country before the Trump administration forces them out. “It would be easier for everyone involved, and more dignified for the departing immigrants than the alternative,” Krikorian wrote.